Ruth Ozeki Quotes

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I am as interested in seeing what happens to my characters as any reader; that is why I tell kids that writers write for the same reason readers read - to find out the end of the story.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.